Sorting Things Out Available to Purchase

This chapter focuses on processes of sorting people out according to sovereign affiliations, and it considers the Ottoman capitulations’ structuring role in a world of global commerce, mobility, and communication, even after the dissolution of the empire after World War I and the denial of sovereignty in favor of “Mandates” tasked with rendering the semicivilized “ready” for sovereignty. In semi-independent Egypt, the Egyptian Mixed Courts were established in 1875 as Egyptian (if international) law to regularize the capitulations in a context in which sovereignty was distributed among the British, the Ottomans, and the Egyptians. The chapter presents case studies of different Mixed Courts cases to explore the complications of multiple sovereign identities before and after the dissolution of the empire until the Mixed Courts’ abolition in 1946, after which distinctions between “local” and “extraterritorial” were relegated to the sphere of “culture.”